among the intellectual disciplines. In the Roman period Cicero and Quintilian continued this tradition.
Within Roman rhetoric, “topics” belongs to the category of inventio, or instructions for the location of arguments. It is related as well to elocutio and memoria, that is, to work on style of presentation and to the necessity of a wealth of memory. Topoi are thus formal instructions for arriving at arguments. At this point Ernst Robert Curtius addresses the way in which medieval Latin transmits the ancient tradition to European literature, stressing, for example, the importance of Isidore of Seville. In this view topoi become materials for a train of thought, as in the controversial topos of the poet’s divine madness.
It is rather astonishing that a Romance scholar like Curtius would not acknowledge Giambattista Vico (whom Auerbach translated and had found useful). By way of contrast, in the field of post-World War II jurisprudence (for example, Theodor Viehweg’s 1953 Topik und Jurisprudenz13), an early speech of Vico—the Neapolitan professor of rhetoric—did lead to a dispute over the fundamental “scientificality” of this practical discipline, which once ranked between medicine and theology. In 1947 the Godesberg publisher Helmut Küpper (formerly the publishing firm of Georg Bondi and once the house of Stefan George) brought out Professor Vico’s 1708 lecture De nostri temporis studiorum ratione.14 In it Vico takes up the critical methods of the Cartesians, which aim at apodictic—extracting conclusions key to true theories. Vico classifies the assumptions upon which the method depends under the old general category of topics, considered both in its original form and what became traditional. In 1947 this talk on types of study was given the pretentious title On the Essence and Path of Intellectual Development. If we compare the opinion of Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, published in the same year, which takes a stand in the dispute over whether or not Germany should participate in the development of nuclear technology, then it becomes clear what was actually being talked about: contemporary self-awareness of responsibility!
For philosophers who were formed by classical philology of the Germans, a reevaluation of despised rhetoric remains offensive. But they must sit up and take notice because in the course of the rehabilitation of practical philosophy, rhetoric, and especially topics as a theory of locating and developing argument, will demand it. In 1965 Helmut Kuhn published his polemic Aristotle and the Methods of Political Science in the Zeitschrift für Politik (Journal of Politics). In it he mentions that in 1947 the Romance scholar Fritz Schalk edited Walter F. Otto’s translation of Vico’s polemical work De nostri temporis studiorum ratione as an instructional work for turbulent times. Vico spoke as a teacher of rhetoric and brought topics into play: before we can judge (dijucatio de veritate or
13. Theodor Viehweg, Topik und Jurisprudenz: Ein Beitrag zur rechtswissenschaftlichen Grundlagenforschung (Munich: Beck, 1953); Topics and Law: A Contribution to Basic Research in Law, trans. W. Cole Durham (New York: Lang, 1993).
14. Giambattista Vico, De nostri temporis studiorum ratione [Vom Wesen und Weg der geistigen Bildung], ed. Fritz Schalk, trans. Walter F. Otto (Bonn-Bad Godesberg: Küpper, 1947).